LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

June 1, 1996

LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE

Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT
Section: EDITORIAL
Page: 15B

Index Terms:
MENTAL HEALTH
LETTERS

Estimated printed pages: 4

Article Text:

Depression Can Be Fatal

A lengthy article on the tragic death of my 15-year-old daughter Aurora Sass appeared in your paper on May 19. She committed suicide at St. John's Mercy Medical Center on April 29 in the adolescent psychiatric unit. My family and I were not happy with the article, but in the mountain of grief work we have to do, it was a blip on the screen. I had not planned to respond until today.

The final letter on Wednesday by Gerald Deppe was too much, the last stroke of blame for Aurora's death that we plan to hear without responding. Please try to remember that Aurora was not a social phenomenon. She was a living, laughing, loving human person who was the center of our existence.

Kristina Sauerwein's article treated her like a casualty of divorce, which she most certainly was not. After the article appeared, the Ku Klux Klan sent me a letter saying my child took her life because I did not provide her with a strong enough white racial identity. And now Deppe lets me know that if her father and I had stayed married, Aurora would be alive.

All of these analyses are very hurtful to us, and, more important, they are wrong. Aurora died because she was depressed. It is a disease, like diabetes. She didn't want it, and, ultimately, we could not cure it. If a diabetic had had a limb amputated, as many do, you wouldn't blame it on a particular pastry the patient had eaten. Diseases are more complex than that.

Depression does have lifestyle components that bring sadness, but all lives have their wounded places in the heart. Depression is a chemical imbalance that makes coping with such difficulties all but impossible because of the tunnel vision it produces. It is an especially insidious disease for teens, who have not had time to develop a solid identity and who do not have the wider perspective of life experiences to understand that pain and joy, disappointment and success, are all necessary andinevitable in the tapestry of life.

Sauerwein's article was a disservice to my daughter and to the many depressed teens and their parents who suffer with them. All of us would crawl through hell over broken glass to save our kids. Our family spent thousands of dollars on psychiatric care and followed the advice of professionals in admitting Aurora to a presumably secure facility when she was suicidal.

It is not helpful to hear that we didn't do enough. The answer to teens' pain is not as simple as cessation of parental bickering, remaining married at all costs or developing a particular racial identity. There is no magic answer because there is no simple cause.

Marilyn M. McGuire
St. Louis

I was most disappointed in the May 19 article by Kristina Sauerwein concerning the suicide death of Aurora Sass.

The first paragraph enraged me immediately. Why would any journalist print such a statement? How could any mother detest the flowers that a father would provide for a child's funeral? This father had every hope of a reconciliation with his children whom the mother had persuaded against him.

It is hard to understand how a mother who "saw her going" could not arrange for proper treatment of a troubled teen-ager. After all, she prides herself on being an ordained minister and a registered nurse. Surely, she had access to the best therapeutic services in the St. Louis area.

One of her major concerns during the court custody battle for her children was the lack of cultural activities and other services for the children in a small town with their father. Don't most of us turn to our ministers for guidance when we encounter problems? If they don't have the answers, they have the resources for referring you to someone who can assist with our concerns.

Perhaps the mother's nasty court battle for custody of Aurora's brothers and her 102-day incarceration in the Randolph County, Ill., jail were more than Aurora could handle. Who cared for this child during the incarceration? I only hope the intent of this article was to prevent future teen-age suicides and not to promote Marilyn McGuire's media campaign. She was quite a promoter with the custody battle and made several appearances on national television talk shows. It appears this article was just the beginning of another media campaign. Aurora does not deserve this type of publicity.

Betty Wagner
Chester, Ill.

The May 19 front-page story that depicts Aurora Catherine Sass's suicide reminds us that young people can and do commit suicide. One out of every 10 teens will attempt suicide by age 19, and youngsters in the 15- to 24-year age range will account for one-fifth of all the suicides each year in the United States. Sixty percent will have experienced the divorce of a parent. Parents always need to take suicide threats and the warning signs of suicide seriously.

Nevertheless, the article leaves out one salient point that I believe is crucial. Aurora's friends duly noted that she had an obsession with rock star Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana. Aurora even wanted Cobain's lyrics buried with her. The anniversary date of Cobain's own suicide, of course, took place just weeks before Aurora's.

Suicidologists have, indeed, noted a so-called copy-cat or contagion effect. Simply put, when a famous person such as a rock singer or a movie star takes his or her own life, the suicide rate will generally go up.

Does this mean that the death of a rock star or lyrics urging one to take his or her own life cause the act of suicide? Not really. Such occurrences will usually have no effect whatsoever on the teen who is not depressed.

What it does say, however, is that if a child is seriously toying with the idea of suicide, the self-destructive behavior of a famous individual can act as a symbolic permission slip to go ahead and make an attempt. The suicidal individual who has a deficit of self-esteem negatively compares himself to the famous individual and thinks: If he or she is famous, successful and can't cope with life, how can I possibly do so?

The bottom line is that parents must be acutely aware that if a teen is depressed a highly publicized suicide could make the situation even more lethal.

Howard Rosenthal
Program Director
Human Services
St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley
Florissant

Caption:
Graphic Illustration by Catherine Kanner/Los Angeles Times Syndicate
GRAPHIC